Farthest Frontier

They're already applying some changes through patches. One other thing I can't believe they haven't added is a minimap. Any game like this needs a minimap.

This game is basically surviving the aftermath. Main issue I'm having is having to go extremely far from home in search of stone.

Also have some issue where regularly the clearing tasks to remove shrubs from building sites never get done and so the building doesn't get built.

A lot of good stuff here -> State of Early Access - update 1

So I'm up to tier 3 and some things I've done/worked out with regards to the issues people have been having.

1) gold income. You can make a decent amount of gold income by spamming a bunch of markets around which is also a good idea because it both increases the desirability of the housing around it and increases the chances of the local houses having multiple food types which is needed for upgrading them.
2) gold expenditure. You can just enable the barracks and lookout towers when bandits/animals arrive and there's more than enough time for the guards to arrive, equip, run out and smash things. I've never had anything stolen or any townsfolk die even though my barracks etc are disabled 99% of the time. When they are disabled there's no monthly gold cost. Same thing goes for the healer's house but it works even better. Townsfolk in the healer's house don't seem to actually have any interaction with the employee healer in the house. The healer's job is to stock the building with food, medicine, etc. Once the building is stocked, the healer's task changes to 'selling snake oil' which doesn't seem to do anything. Even when the building is disabled, sick townsfolk still go there and get healed as long as the house is stocked with medicine. So all you need to do now and then is enable the building, let the healer stock the supplies in the building, and disable it again. Townsfolk will arrive and get healed without a healer even being there. Obviously both of these building types shouldn't really work that way and will probably get fixed in some way. At the moment in early t3 I have +61 gold income from my markets which is enough to run all of those buildings at once non stop if needed, but that would heavily impact my gold production which I use for buying things from the trading post.
3) trading post. this is important, it's the only source that I've found of animals for the barn which is a very useful source of food + leather. It's also the only way that I've found to get heavy tools which are needed for making bread in t2, and even the building that makes heavy tools in t3 requires heavy tools to build, so you absolutely must buy heavy tools from the trading post. With a good monthly gold supply like I have, and as long as you stop bandits from stealing your gold (i had a problem with this early on but resolved it with the above), then you have heaps of spare gold for buying needed resources. You can also make heaps of gold selling unnecessary luxuries, like for example I had way too much soap so I sold some of it for a quick 1500 gold.
4) resources needed before you can make them. I mentioned above about heavy tools. There are also plenty of items you can make in t2 which you need t3 materials for, the most annoying one being barrels since they would be really handy. You need iron ingots to make them at the cooper, but you can't make iron ingots until t3. Could buy iron ingots at the market which I probably should have done but I decided to just power for t3 as fast as possible which actually turned out to be pretty fast when I figured out how to get the required desirability on a large scale.
5) desirability. I built a large park, then i just surrounded that with houses with roads in between like the suburbs. I interspersed markets so every house was in range of at least one market, and did the same with schools. None of those buildings have an upkeep and that is more than enough desirability to get the t3 upgrade. The most expensive part of it is the park which you only need 1 of, and the most time consuming part of it was waiting for 125 population but once I had heaps of high desirability housing empty i seemed to get waves and waves of immigrants pretty fast and powered up to 125 in short order.
6) stone. this is my most common restricted resource and I have work camps an absurd distance from my town trying to find more. Devs obviously know this is a problem based on the above dev update.
7) food. my most common source of angst is all of a sudden 3 months of food rotting and I'm down to 1 or even 0 months of food supply but then a harvest comes in and I'm good. I've never had anyone starve, although people do occasionally get upset when their houses have no food in them. I haven't spent any time thoroughly investigating the effectiveness of the various food sources but orchard and barns both seem quite good, plus you can move every blueberry shrub you find on your map into one cluster of them somewhere so they can all be tended by one forager. Blueberry shrubs seem to be the only forager target that is movable which is strange. For now having foragers all other the place seems important to keep the supply of the various resources especially herb/medicine & willow flowing since foraging seems to be the only source of those items so far.

All in all this game is quite good but very much early access. There's a lot of balance, fixes and content to come but I am very confident the devs will do what's needed (check out the above dev update). Like I said in my previous post, this is surviving the aftermath, they are almost the exact same game. Farthest Frontier looks better and I believe it will end up being a good improvement over aftermath as development moves along.


**EDIT: The advice under #2 is mostly bad advice. I didn't notice that when you re-enable guard posts it has to hire guards at 25g a pop, so this is actually a really expensive exercise. Disabling the healer's hut does seem to work although apparently when the building is disabled it doesn't give the desirability perk - not a big deal.

It's definitely playable but i think it will be a much better game in 6-12 months